Introduction to Durbin and Watson (1950, 1951) Testing for Serial Correlation in Least Squares Regression. I, II

Fitting a linear function of some variables (denoted by x₁, …,x _k ) to a variable denoted y by least squares is an old statistical technique. In the Fisherian revolution of the 1920s and 1930s, statistical methods were mainly applied in the natural sciences where one could often design the experiments that produced the data. The emphasis was largely on how the experiments should be designed to make the least-squares assumptions valid rather than on checking the correctness of these assumptions.